San Francisco’s Chariot shuttle service to shut down

A Chariot shuttle van drives near a commuter stop on Christie Avenue in Emeryville, Calif. on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. A grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is subsidizing commuter runs for UCSF employees to provide transportation between East Bay locations and the Mission Bay campus. less

A Chariot shuttle van drives near a commuter stop on Christie Avenue in Emeryville, Calif. on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. A grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is subsidizing commuter runs for ... more

A Chariot shuttle van drives near a commuter stop on Christie Avenue in Emeryville, Calif. on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. A grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is subsidizing commuter runs for UCSF employees to provide transportation between East Bay locations and the Mission Bay campus. less

A Chariot shuttle van drives near a commuter stop on Christie Avenue in Emeryville, Calif. on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. A grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is subsidizing commuter runs for ... more

Chariot, which operates commuter shuttles along fixed routes, will cease operations by the end of March, it said Thursday. Chariot’s familiar turquoise-and-white Ford Transit Wagons will stop service in San Francisco and other U.S. cities after Feb. 1. Commuter service will end in Britain, its sole international location, after Jan. 25.

The reason is simple: Chariot cannot make money.

“It has become clear that the mobility services delivered by Chariot over the past five years will not be a sustainable solution going forward,” CEO Dan Grossman wrote in a draft blog post the company provided.

The Ford Motor Co. acquired Chariot in September 2016, saying the then-2-year-old startup was key to a future of changing mobility. Ford invested heavily to expand Chariot’s operation beyond its San Francisco hometown. Chariot’s website shows that it runs services in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Denver, Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, as well as London.

But Ford evidently wasn’t willing to support Chariot indefinitely.

“Nobody in this country’s been able to figure out how to run transit without subsidies,” said Doug Bloch, political director with Teamsters Joint Council 7. In 2017, the Teamsters organized Chariot’s San Francisco drivers as members of its Local 665. Chariot’s 15 Seattle drivers also recently unionized with the Teamsters. “They were operating essentially on farebox recovery.”

The overwhelming majority of U.S. mass transportation providers, including Muni and BART, rely on taxpayer dollars to fill the gap between what fares generate and what it actually costs to operate the service.

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Bloch said the union is negotiating with Chariot to seek severance pay for drivers. It will hold a job fair for them in San Francisco in the near future.

“The only silver lining is that people with Class B commercial licenses are in high demand right now,” he said.

Chariot had two businesses: commuter shuttles along fixed routes open to anyone, and dedicated shuttle services for private companies, including GoPro and UCSF. In recent weeks, Chariot said it would focus more heavily on corporate transportation.

Chariot operated four shuttle lines for UCSF between East Bay locations and its Mission Bay campus, said UCSF spokeswoman Elizabeth Fernandez. About 200 workers had used the service, although not all rode it every day. A grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission helped fund that initiative, which aimed to reduce Bay Bridge traffic. UCSF employees paid $7.50 per ride.

“We’re in the planning stages of figuring out what we can do” to replace that service, Fernandez said.

Grossman, previously Ford’s head of microtransit, quietly took over as Chariot CEO a year ago from co-founder Ali Vahabzadeh, TechCrunch reported at the time. Ford reportedly paid $65 million for Chariot, which had raised just $3 million.

“We helped Ford build their mobility business, and their experience with Chariot continues to inform their mobility efforts and design decisions for the future,” Grossman wrote in his blog post, noting that Chariot had provided more than 3 million rides.

One notable feature of Chariot was the way it asked users to vote on where they wanted to go. Last year, as part of winning a new permit for private transit operators, it agreed to not create any new routes that would directly compete with existing Muni lines.

Chariot riders expressed disappointment at news of the shutdown.

“It was very convenient and comfortable; what used to be an hour on Muni became 25 minutes on Chariot,” said Chasa Toliver-Leger, who paid $119 a month to ride Chariot from her Marina district home to her architecture firm job South of Market. “It’s too bad.”

Now she plans to investigate what replacement makes the most sense for money, convenience and time — taking two Muni lines or using Uber or Lyft.